VISTA Plus for MPE Administrator's Guide
Chapter 1
1-4
VISTA Plus Overview
VISTA is Easy to Use
Viewing reports is simple with VISTA. You can quickly scroll through any report, or select a
specific page to be displayed and printed. VISTA also offers function keys that let you move within
a report, search for text strings, and customize VISTA. The terminal’s arrow keys can be used to
scroll the report vertically and horizontally. The terminal’s tab key can be used to shift the report’s
page 80 characters to the right. This makes it possible to quickly view any portion of the report.
VISTA Saves Paper and Disk Space
VISTA lets you interactively browse through reports. This means that you do not have to save
printed copies of reports or manually search through a report for specific information.
Printing production reports is a task that can also be eliminated with VISTA. VISTA automatically
captures reports to folders. These reports can always be reprinted. In VISTA, a folder is a term used
to describe a file that holds reports.
Even reports that are destroyed while printing can be recovered because the capturing process is
performed prior to printing. Print job reruns and redundant processing are virtually eliminated.
VISTA saves disk space by compressing the data in reports when they are placed in folders. This
can reduce a report’s space requirements by as much as 50 percent from the original spool file.
VISTA also provides report security. The administrator using VISTA can define report access
listing the users that are permitted to view each report. Since read access defines print access, users
will not be able to print any section of a report they are not authorized to view.
NBSpool and VISTA
The first step is to create a VISTA folder. You can do this by using NBSpool’s VSAVE command
to save a selection of spool files to a specific file name. This group of files becomes a VISTA folder.
Once a folder exists, reports can be added to it, and security for specific reports can be assigned.
Once a report is in a folder, both the folder and the report can be viewed through VISTA.
Spool files not yet in VISTA folders can be viewed with NBSpool. NBSpool’s BROWSE command
invokes VISTA for full-screen viewing of spool files. Turn to Chapter 3 in this guide for more
information on the NBSpool commands.